The Devil's Violinist directed by Bernard Rose and starring David Garrett, chronicles the life of the infamous violin maestro Niccolo Paganini.
My impression of this film was that it was trying to be some knock-off of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is an easy enough conclusion to come to if you see Niccolo Paganini as Dorian and Corbani as Lord Henry. There was even the *completely made up* innocent ingenue who acts to purify the sinful main character, although Lord Henry's daughter was a figment of the film version and not the book. I wish there had been more subtlety about the whole Faustian bargain; the scene at the beginning was a bit too literal with the expression of selling your soul to the devil.
The movie was obviously catering to an audience: it completely overplayed the whole Satan theme, and the sex was just downright gratuitous. I mean, yes, that was something Paganini was known for but the whole movie centered around how Paganini was such a "seducer" and there is obviously SO much more to his life than that. All of the drama, action, emotion, and plot progress in the film ended up centering around Niccolo's conquests and the rumors about his love life, when more time should have been spent actually portraying his life and who he was as a person. The daddy problems vaguely hinted at in a couple scenes were a last-ditch effort to give some dimension to the main character, but it was so half-hearted and such a trope that it only warranted an eye-roll. Even after spending two hours with him, the viewer doesn't really know Paganini at all, and I refuse to accept that this was intentional on behalf of his little speech about how nobody knows him and he puts all he is into music. That's not an excuse for a lack of character development. Corbani came out of nowhere and left out of nowhere: he always seems to be there and yet remains a cardboard cutout of a character the whole time. What are his motives, really? I suppose money but really a man as clever as him could find a better and less dramatic way to make money. His role in the film was forced and only existed because the writers wanted to push the devil element so badly. Really I think I would have liked the story better without him.
The one thing this movie did have going for it was David Garrett's beautiful beautiful face. The tan, the tousled hair, and hint of guyliner; it all came together to create something worth suffering through two hours of cheesy dialogue and non-existent plot for. I appreciate that a real violinist was found to play the part of Paganini: I only wish they could have found a violinist who could also act. David Garrett wasn't horrible, per se, but the fake Italian accent was pretty painful, and in the scenes where he couldn't get away with simply smoldering, his acting felt fake and distracted from whatever was happening. They at least tried to compensate for these flaws with many shots of exposed torso, so I appreciated that effort.
Considering that the movie was about a musician, the music wasn't used to its full capacity. Just because the music was actually a plot point in the movie doesn't mean the scene always had to be of the performers when it was playing: the movie ended up with performance scenes that dragged on when I felt the music could have been used to better effect behind another scene, where it would have connected the story more and accentuated emotions and mood. I felt that the music scenes fell just short of the level of drama they really needed because they focused too greatly on the musicians performing and not on anything else going on in the plot. I did, however, like the mix of music: the pieces written by Paganini himself with (I believe) a piece written by David Garrett.
Despite the torture of sitting through two hours of this movie, I did like the sentiment expressed at the end, when Paganini says, "I will live forever." and then nestles down amidst his sheet music. That's the beauty of art; you put everything you are into it and through doing so you become immortal. I was actually pretty heartbroken SPOILER about how things ended up with Niccolo and Charlotte, although being together after the whole affair seemed pretty impossible for them. However, when Niccolo writes to her and says there is some love between them, and again at the end when he is playing the violin part to the song he wrote and Charlotte is singing it, I think of a quote I like that goes something like, "If two people love the same thing,...then they must love each other, at least a little, even if they never say it." I forget where that's from, but it seems to encapsulate the relationship between the two musicians.
This movie wasn't all that I wanted it to be- I feel it sacrificed a lot to please the crowd, which is ironic in a way since that is the very sentiment that is shown in a negative light at the beginning of the movie. I wouldn't recommend it, but definitely look into Niccolo Paganini if you're interested in music history, and I know there are other movies that address his life on the Wikipedia page I linked above.
This is actually a very pretty song.
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